Kirubhakar Purushothaman

Kolai, Raththam, Mazhai Pidikathavum Manidhanum, Hitler… after such a barrage of misses, a sense of prejudice is expected to set in when Vijay Antony comes up with another crime thriller. But a few minutes into the film, Maargan assures you that the streak will be broken. It exhibits good craftsmanship despite ticking all the boxes of genre films and treads carefully without breaching the territory of clichés. To top it all, it sets up an engrossing supernatural premise involving Siddhars and astral projections that effortlessly win you over. Tamil cinema tends to get overly didactic and self-congratulatory when it ventures into such themes of ancient knowledge. However, Leo John Paul’s success lies in the way he effortlessly sells you his ruse. The trick, after all, is not to convince you to believe but to entertain enough that you don’t mind. To give the context, Maargan is an investigation thriller where an archetypical resigned police officer, Dhruv (Vijay Antony), takes up a case that looks similar to the murder of his daughter. A Chennai girl, on her birthday, is murdered by an unknown killer using a chemical cocktail which, when injected, burns the body from the inside, turning it black. Dhruv takes over the case unofficially and arrests a suspect named Tamilarivu (Ajay Dishan), a brilliantly written role. As Tamil is subjected to police interrogation, it is realised that he is innocent but has supernatural abilities that would aid the investigation. With his astral projection abilities, he puts himself at risk of finding the killer, which also turns out to be an effective surprise.

Good Day starts with a line from Tamil writer G. Nagarajan’s existential novel Naalai Matrum Oru Naalae, which is about a labourer and the things that pan out in his life on a single day. The novel gives an eagle-eye perspective of the non-person as he goes about his day getting some work done and indulging in vices. Good Day is also about one such person from the fringes of society. Shanthakumar (Prithiviraj Ramalingam), a supervisor at a textile factory, begins his birthday with distress as his monthly salary is yet to hit his account. He asks his housemate to lend him a thousand rupees, but when the friend asks him to run an errand, Shanthakumar refuses. His ego is hurt. Hours later at his office, he gets slapped by his manager in front of a co-worker. We aren’t told why, but we understand that Shanthakumar is facing the fire for backing the co-worker, who was facing sexual harassment at the hands of the manager. The manager, being the son-in-law of the factory’s owner, leaves Shanthakumar to swallow his ego and endure the humiliation. And his salary is still yet to reach his account.

It is natural to expect a moral tale about greed or an existential fable about wealth with a film titled Kuberaa (the Hindu God of wealth) and with a beggar for a protagonist. But what one would fear is the film turning overly sentimental about poverty. Kuberaa is both. As expected, it is a story of a naive beggar taking a cunning multi-millionaire for a ride, throwing a familiar light on the rich, exposing them to be self-serving murderers. It is a social commentary on the top one percent, failing to help the rest. On the other hand, the film also has a familiar gaze of the poor as a naive and oppressed lot – a perspective that has been popularised by our mainstream commercial films. However, Kuberaa treads this path carefully.

Set around the third installment of the John Wick film series, Ballerina is the story of another assassin from that world who defies the rules and faces consequences. With action set pieces that are increasingly bloody and creative, a well-etched character arc, and a similar philosophical core to its parent series, Ballerina turns out to be an effective companion piece to the John Wick films. However, if you are someone who finds yourself in the theatre unaware of the franchise’s legacy, Ballerina might come across as an excuse for a series of incredibly sophisticated fight sequences stitched together by a semblance of a story. As an origin story, Ballerina takes a familiar route: an orphaned child, robbed of her innocence, with a burning vengeance deep in her heart, that doesn’t let her choose a path that would save her from getting her hands bloody. Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas), as a child, witnesses her father die at the hands of a cult while saving her from their grasp. She grows up with her father’s family, which turns out to be the Ruska Roma, the same criminal organisation that John Wick belongs to. Under the mentorship of its Director (Anjelica Huston), Eve is taught to become an assassin and, more importantly, to “fight like a girl." However, that’s the extent to which the film explores gender politics, as there isn’t a lot of depth to Eve, and she does almost everything John would have done in her place.

Some tales are beyond redundancy. Despite the utmost familiarity and success, they get retold again and again throughout history, and we call them classics. Hence, a question about the purpose of a new iteration of an age-old classic is unnecessary, to an extent, absurd. How To Train Your Dragon, written by Cressida Cowell, is one such story. Hence, despite the tremendous success of its animated adaptation of the same name that was released in 2010, we now have a live-action version. However, DreamWorks Studio’s decision to do a live-action remake has more to do with easy profit than anything else. Following Disney’s route, the studio has ventured into this new space, and one should say they have hit a jackpot. Despite being a faithful remake of the original, the live-action remake retains the joy and visual spectacle that is a treat to both sets of audience: those who are and are not aware of this delectable world of dragons and Vikings.

The first half of Thug Life has something that recent Tamil gangster dramas don’t: drama. The film begins in 1995 in Old Delhi with a supposed peace talk between two gangs in a crowded and bustling old building. On one hand, we have Rangaraya Saktivel (Kamal Haasan) and his gang, on the other, Sadanand (Mahesh Manjrekar), who has set his enemies up. The police force close in and amidst all this tension, a father, his son, and daughter go about delivering dailies to each door. The exchanges between the characters are natural and subtle, and we get a smart, de-aged Kamal Haasan. He doesn’t get a raging introduction scene. Anything and everything is for the scene and the tension, which ends in the poor father getting shot as collateral damage and Sakthivel walking away carrying the orphaned boy Amar (Silambarasan TR) as his ‘shield’ from the police bullets. This straightforward, simple, but effective storytelling makes the first half of Thug Life an engrossing watch, and it undoes everything it achieves in the second.

A bunch of friends, after a night of heavy drinking, wake up to find one of them dead. Panic-stricken, the four of them try to get rid of the body, and thus begins their car ride, and the audience’s excruciating ordeal that lasts for 100 minutes. Manidhargal, a crowd-funded movie, has a core problem of being an inadequate idea for a feature film. The story is wafer-thin that would have suited a short flick as the sequences are redundant without any major development or revelation. Though Manidhargal is a relatively short feature film, it can feel exhausting to watch, especially as the scenes of grown men crying and panicking become difficult to endure. Kaali (Kapil Velavan) is supposed to be the hard-boiled character in the film, who doesn’t break till the end. Mano (Gunavarthan) is the crybaby, who doesn’t stop his antics. Sathish (Dhasha) is a relatively sane guy who also starts wailing as the clock ticks. Samba Sivam as Chandru seems to have drunk something potent than Absinthe, because he doesn’t seem to sober up. Arjun Dev as Deepan is part of the film because having just three characters would make the painful redundancy obvious. The four lead actors are like emojis that don’t change their expression.

There is an old couple in Maaman played by Rajkiran and Viji Chandrasekar. His name is Singarayar and hers is Pavun. Their subplot has no bearing on the central conflict (which itself doesn’t seem to find closure), but this digression is intended to draw a parallel between their relationship and that of the lead couple Inba (Soori) and Reka (Aishwarya Lekshmi). It’s a rural attempt at recreating Ganapathy Iyer (Prakash Raj) and Bhavani Ganapathy (Leela Samson) from Mani Ratnam’s OK Kanmani. If you’ve followed Tamil cinema since the late ’90s, you’ll know exactly how this relationship will play out—down to its morbid end. A running, friendly tussle between them is that Singarayar only buys her flowers but doesn’t braid them into her hair himself. The emotional payoff is designed to move you to tears, and if it does, Maaman will strike many such chords throughout. If it doesn’t—and you squirm at the melodrama—the film will feel like a bundle of clichés.